Friday, March 26, 2010

LGBT Youth: Back By Popular Demand!

I was overwhelmed by the positive response to last week's posting about LGBT youth issues, especially about the wonderful book by C.J. Pascoe about sexuality and gender in high schools today, with its eye-catching title, Dude, You're a Fag. So here's the full review, boys & girls, and everyone outside or in between. Enjoy!

“Cheering students filled River High’s gymnasium. Packed tightly in bleachers, they sang, hollered, and danced to loud hip-hop music. Over their heads hung banners celebrating fifty years of River High’s sports victories. The yearly assembly in which the student body voted for the most popular senior boy in the school to be crowned Mr. Cougar was under way, featuring six candidates performing a series of skits to earn student votes.”

Thus begins Dude, You’re a Fag, which has the accessible narrative tone of a coming-out novel but is actually an incisive, well-researched, fascinating ethnography of a year in the life of students at a suburban, working-class public high school in Northern California. C. J. Pascoe, who now teaches sociology at the University of Puget Sound, did a year of fieldwork at the pseudonymous River High while a graduate student at the University of California, Berkelely. It’s a tribute to her skill as a storyteller that in this opening scene, and mostly throughout, Dude reads more like a novel, or even a screenplay, than like a master’s thesis.

For most gays and lesbians, the thought of returning to high school for a year rates on a par with taking a hiking trip through Siberia. Many of us have doubtless wondered, though, exactly how—or if—high schools have changed for gay youth in the last decade. Never mind Stonewall—how have the Internet, Brokeback Mountain, and The L-Word changed the way gay kids grow up today? By spending a year in trenches, observing students in their native habitats—the classroom, the weight room, the quad, the parking lot, the principle’s office, school assemblies—Pascoe shines a light on these and other questions.

For native Californians like myself, who came of age and came out in the early 1990s in a high school eerily similar to River High, Pascoe provides clues about the real-life location of the school where Pascoe did her fieldwork: “Riverton’s approximately one hundred thousand residents are over half white and about a quarter Latino or Hispanic. The rest identify in relatively equal numbers as African American or Asian [American].”

Aside from protecting the identities of the young people Pascoe interviewed, the anonymity performs a neat trick, recasting River High as what it most resembles—a typical Middle American high school, complete with pep rallies, cheerleaders, Homecoming dances, and Cougar pride. This “everyschool” aura convinces the reader that the sexual harassment Pascoe witnesses is a nationwide phenomenon.

Pascoe makes a convincing case for the notion that masculinity, above all, rules the high school roost, and that establishing, guarding, and proving one’s masculinity is a full-time job for those who are willing or able to do the work. With a nod to queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick, Pascoe points out that while homosexuality is no longer pathologized, gay male effeminacy is pathologized, and that the same edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders “that erased homosexuality as a diagnosis in the 1970s added a new diagnosis in its wake: Gender Identity Disorder”; to merit this diagnosis, a girl must “actually assert that she is a boy…whereas a boy need only display a preoccupation with female activities.”

For boys, the main way to protect and defend their fragile masculinity is through what Pascoe terms “fag discourse”—the omnipresent back-and-forth lobbing by boys of the word fag and its permutations “in a verbal came of hot potato, each careful to deflect the insult quickly by hurling it toward someone else.” Girls, although they are constantly prey to sexual harassment from boys (which, in her whole year at River High, Pascoe never saw disciplined or reprimanded), are immune to the fag epithet, which as Jeremy, a Latino junior says, is “the lowest thing you can call someone.” Girls do monitor each other for behavior that is appropriately feminine—i.e., sexually passive and non-agentic—but not to the level that boys monitor each other: “the word slut (or its synonym ho) appeared one time for every eight times the word fag appeared.” (Pascoe slyly dubs this obsessive masculinity game “compulsive heterosexuality,” a clever nod to Adrienne Rich’s influential concept of “compulsory heterosexuality.”)

Ironically, at River High, lesbians are the main beneficiaries of this “crisis of masculinity.” Rebeca, an African American member of the women’s basketball team, is by all accounts one of the most popular girls at River High, admired by boys for her attractive, curvaceous physique and ability to attract other women, and admired by girls for her strong, dominant personality. Moreover the senior class president—and Homecoming Queen—is a masculine-identified, slacks-wearing, Asian American lesbian named Jessie. Pascoe is quick to note that masculinity, though traditionally ascribed to male bodies, is a mutable construct, one that girls can adopt to gain status while simultaneously reinscribing and reinforcing notions of masculine power.

As mutable and fragile as masculinity is revealed to be in Dude, Pascoe reminds us that there are some boys who are unable to move the “fag discourse” off of themselves: “For the one boy who permanently inhabited the fag position, life at River High was not easy.” For the gentle, effeminate Ricky, who enjoys choreography and wears make-up, the “double transgression of sexual and gender identity made his position at River High simply unlivable. The lack of protection from the administration meant facing torture on a daily basis.” Ultimately, Ricky, bereft of a supportive family or community, drops out of River High and moves to a nearby city to perform in local drag shows.

Pascoe is at her strongest in analyzing all of these and other stories through feminist and queer theory, quoting greats in those fields like Sedgwick, Adrienne Rich and Judith Butler. But from a political standpoint, there is much, much more that remains to be said about Dude and about the adolescent zeitgeist it portrays.Exposed as never before to media representations of gays and lesbians, students at River High are able to elect a lesbian of color as Senior Class President, and even to say about gay men that “[b]eing gay is just a lifestyle. It’s someone you choose to sleep with. You can still throw around a football and be gay.”

Today’s teenagers, familiar with the heteronormative images of gays they receive from television, film—and, arguably, from the mainstream LGBT political movement—are now able to tolerate gay men who toe the gender-role line, but fags like Ricky remain fags always. This is what Riki Wilkins has termed the “Eminem Exception”—a reference to the rap artist Eminem, who has attempted to absolve himself of the label “homophobe” by claiming he uses the term fag for men who are weak and unmanly, regardless of sexual orientation.

Dude, You’re a Fag provides persuasive proof that gender identity should not be seen as an expendable addition to employment nondiscrimination laws, nor as an auxiliary to gay liberation—an optional T in our LGBT community. Gender identity is not a side issue; it is the issue. Until we get this message, which Pascoe’s book so clearly spells out, boys like Ricky will be jettisoned, and only those gay boys who can throw a football and those lesbians who comply with notions of masculine supremacy will be able to enjoy the dignity that all humans deserve.

"Blogging is vanity...

... Like loving the smell of your own farts. Like not only tasting your menstrual blood, but making bloody thumbprints and buying gold-leafed frames in which to display them. But the truth is, not everything you think is worth publishing. Not everyone's opinion matters. How to distinguish a "pundit" from a gasbag? Impossible! On television, they yell and posture. On blogs, they are equally puffed up with self-importance. Only blog if you can make others laugh. This includes laughing at yourself."—Erica Jong